All the bigotry that's fit to print

The New York Times recently revived a brand of religious bigotry that most Americans thought died when Roman Catholics and Jews won their parties' bids for the White House.

Although deeply wounded, that monster isn't dead yet. The Times put the emergency paddles on religious bigotry and brought it screaming back to life with the April 3rd front-page headline, "Romney Leads G.O.P. in Money, Tapping Wall St. and Mormons." (The story is pasted below.)

I don't have a horse in the presidential primary of either political party and would find this headline, and the story that followed, outrageous no matter which candidate was the subject.

Imagine if the story was about the $26 million that Hillary Clinton collected during the same period and it read, "Clinton Shatters Contribution Record with Cash from Hollywood and Jews."

The public outrage would be overwhelming. Editors, reporters and headline writers would be fired and the paper would run a 10,000-word self-flagellation of how it came to hire the scoundrels.

That the Times ran the headline and story is itself disturbing. What is remarkable is how they concluded that Romney's contributors were, in fact, Mormons. The Federal Election Commission doesn't ask contributors to identify their religious affiliation.

The story notes that some well-heeled and very public members of the Mormon Church, for example members of the Marriott and Huntsman families, donated to the campaign. But those contributions are but a fraction of the $20 million that the Romney campaign raised during the reporting period.

The Times sorted Romney's contributors according to residency and based its conclusion on the fact that 15 percent of Romney's contributors reside in Utah, a state the Times identifies as, "the center of the Mormon Church."

I don't know a lot about Mormons other than that they are Christians, they don't drink or smoke and at one time the church embraced polygamy. I do know something about bigotry though, and one of the greatest newspapers in the history of journalism seems to think that when it comes to Mormons, a little bigotry is fit to print.

From The New York Times, April 3, page 1:

The New York Times

April 3, 2007 Tuesday
Late Edition - Final

Romney Leads G.O.P. in Money, Tapping Wall St. and Mormons

BYLINE: By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

SECTION: Section A; Column 1; National Desk; THE 2008 CAMPAIGN; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1082 words

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 2

Mitt Romney's presidential campaign said Monday that it had raised $20 million in the first quarter, tapping two distant but rich networks -- Wall Street and the Mormon Church -- to easily outpace his better-known Republican primary rivals.

Senator John McCain, the Arizona lawmaker once considered the front-runner, brought in $12.5 million, his campaign said. It was an unexpected shortfall that could hamper his momentum, and his campaign acknowledged disappointment. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's campaign said it had raised about $15 million.

Both of those figures would have set records in previous years, but on Monday, they were dwarfed by the money raised by Mr. Romney and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, who brought in $26 million.

Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Romney, said the total was ''indicative of the extraordinary success he has had reaching out and discussing important issues with the American people.'' Mr. Madden credited an online system -- called ''com-Mitt'' -- that the campaign had set up for volunteer fund-raisers to send information and solicitations by e-mail to their friends and associates.

Still, polls show that Mr. Romney remains relatively little known outside Massachusetts, where he was elected governor in 2002; the business world, where he delivered hefty returns for investors in Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded; and Utah, where he has played a prominent role in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and helped oversee the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Although Mr. Romney's membership in the Mormon Church has often been discussed as a potential political liability, he has taken deliberate steps to turn his affiliation with the church into a fund-raising asset. He has tapped wealthy Mormons including the Marriott family, founders of the hotel chain, and Jon M. Huntsman Sr., who made a fortune in plastics packaging.

Last year, for example, Mr. Huntsman and his sons gave more than $100,000 to political action committees set up to lay the groundwork for Mr. Romney's campaign. A handful of other Mormons have contributed especially heavily as well. They made the contributions through a chain of federal and state committees Mr. Romney set up that allowed donors to contribute more than the $5,000 limit on gifts to federal PACs.. Residents of Utah, the center of the Mormon Church, contributed about 15 percent of the total contributions, more per capita than any other state.

Last fall, three officials of the Romney campaign met privately with a senior leader of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City about reaching out to the six million Mormons around the country. The Boston Globe reported that Romney campaign officials also contacted officers of the church's Brigham Young University, where Mr. Romney attended college. Two administrators of the university's business school later sent an e-mail message to 150 supporters and alumni soliciting donations for the campaign, the newspaper reported.

Tax laws bar churches and other tax-exempt charitable groups from partisan politics. The church and the Romney campaign both issued statements attesting to church's neutrality as an institution and denying any effort to enlist it in the Romney campaign. A spokesman for the Mormon Church said that the meeting was a ''courtesy visit,'' and that Brigham Young had said the two deans acted inappropriately.

Mr. Madden said Mr. Romney was ''focusing on building support across the broad spectrum of the American electorate,'' not just among Mormons.

''Having said that,'' Mr. Madden continued, ''I expect that the way a lot of Greek-Americans supported Michael Dukakis or Jewish voters supported Joe Lieberman, there will be support for Governor Romney among members of the Church of Latter-day Saints.''

Mr. Romney's campaign also said Monday that he had lent the campaign $2.35 million out of his own pocket as seed money, demonstrating a willingness to open his wallet for campaign money that none of his 2008 rivals can match. Mr. Romney has never disclosed his net worth, but analysts who study compensation at private equity firms say his earnings as the founder of Bain Capital are likely to amount to several hundred million dollars. In 2002, he spent $6 million of his own money on his $9.4 million campaign for governor.

What is more, records of Mr. Romney's political action committees indicate that he also accumulated a valuable Rolodex during his years at Bain. Executives of Bain Capital and its sister firm, Bain Consulting, contributed more than $64,000 over the last two years to Mr. Romney's federal political action committee, Commonwealth PAC, and in 2002 they gave more than $14,000 to his campaign for governor. Executives of Fidelity Investments, the mutual fund giant based in Boston, contributed $30,000 to the PAC and $22,500 to the campaign for governor. Massachusetts campaign laws capped individual contributions at $500.

Mr. Romney helped make many others rich through steep annual returns for investors in Bain Capital and through its payments to finance or buy out private companies. Some. like Thomas Stemberg, founder of Staples, have returned the favor with political contributions.

Meg Whitman, who has made a fortune as chief executive of eBay, met Mr. Romney when she worked as a Bain consultant. In January, she signed on as a financial co-chairwoman of his presidential campaign. She and scores of others called their own contacts on his behalf as part of a public demonstration of his fund-raising prowess that raised more than $6 million in one day.

Unlike the other leading primary campaigns, Mr. Romney's declined to disclose how many individual donors had contributed or how many small donations it had received. Some campaigns use those measurements to show that they have broad support.

Mr. Romney's first-quarter take may undercut some of Mrs. Clinton's triumph, but his lead over his party rivals most damages Mr. McCain.

Mr. McCain's campaign manager, Terry Nelson, said in a statement that the campaign was ''taking the necessary steps to ensure fund-raising success moving forward.''

A McCain campaign official, speaking anonymously to discuss internal strategy, said its managers had realized a few weeks ago that its fund-raising system needed an overhaul. The campaign has now adopted a system for more clearly tracking the contributions of its surrogate fund-raisers just as the other leading campaigns have done.